Syria celebrates a year since the fall of Assad
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Syria celebrates a year since the fall of Assad, and an end to a brutal fifty-year dictatorship. But what sort of rule and what sort of future does Syria face?
Also in the programme: Ukraine's President Zelensky pleads for Europe and the US to remain to united over ending the war with Russia – we hear from former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt; how China's trade surplus hit a trillion dollars; and the blind football fan who says that, thanks to a virtual reality headset, he can for the first time literally watch a game.
(IMAGE: People gather during a parade marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Idlib, Syria, 08 December 2025 / CREDIT: BILAL AL-HAMMOUD/EPA/Shutterstock (16051801r))
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.0 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London. |
| 0:15.0 | I'm Tim Franks. Exactly this time a year ago, the barely imaginable happened. Syria broke free from the |
| 0:23.2 | Assad's, the dictatorship that had kept a country in its dead grip for more than five decades, |
| 0:29.3 | that dictatorship fell. Bashar al-Assad and his family fled to Moscow as a band of rebels |
| 0:35.9 | led by a one-time jihadist swept into Damascus. |
| 0:39.9 | Today, one year on from that revolution, the centre of the capital resounded to an extended fireworks display. |
| 0:51.2 | The sound of pyrotechnics over Umayyad Square at the very heart of Damascus. |
| 0:56.0 | I mentioned that the band of rebels had been led by a one-time Al-Qaeda-affiliated militant. |
| 1:01.6 | He was then known as Abu Mohammed al-Gilani. |
| 1:04.4 | The US still had a $10 million bounty on his head. |
| 1:08.2 | Jilani quickly shed his combat fatigues and his non-deguare and took to |
| 1:12.1 | wearing suits and being known by his original name of Ahmed al-Shara. Today, as president of |
| 1:18.3 | this new Syria, he pledged a clean break from the Assad family's poisonous legacy. |
| 1:28.2 | Today, as the sun of freedom rises, |
| 1:31.6 | we're announcing an historic break from the past, |
| 1:34.7 | an end to the fiction of the Assad regime |
| 1:36.8 | and a permanent separation from authoritarian rule, |
| 1:41.1 | towards a new dawn, |
| 1:43.8 | a dawn of justice and benevolence, of citizenship and coexistence, |
| 1:48.6 | of innovation and commitment to building a nation. |
| 1:51.6 | The end of our battle against the former regime is only the start of a new battle, |
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